Well, the original poster was asking for a Protestant perspective. And by nearly any Protestant church’s standards, Catholicism exerts a tremendous amount of direct influence over its members’ lives, and has very effective lines of communication. Not every Catholic obeys the Church’s teaching on sexuality and other matters, but even disobedient Catholics know what the Church has to say about that. In many Protestants’ view, a worldwide organisation with the power to disseminate encyclicals, papal directives, bulls, &c., and have their contents become general knowledge within the Church, could probably enjoin or at least talk up the desirability of reading the Bible if it cared about such things.
→ Yup i agree Protestantism/Catholicism does exerts a tremendous influence over the member’s live and has effective communication. But all i can say is whether individual would like to follow this form of communication!! We are all human, no matter how your church teaches you, some pple just got stray…In fact when i’m stil an ignorant protestant, i was told by one of my catholic frez , they are more holier then us, and have many practises which they need to abide…like the view towards marriage, fasting…etc…unlike we protestant.
As for bible reading, well in have been tradition for catholic since few centuary back that they are ban from reading the bible, bcoz the priet find that commoner might not able to understand the deep of scripture and might misinterpret it…but to what i know…lately their priest have started catholic believer to read their bible regularly…whether anot individual wanted to pick up the habit is all up to them. To what i know…catholic need to attend daily mass for 2yrs to cover almost the entire bible preaching. But the question i always wanted to ask catholic believer is…i understand they have their so call missal during mass, they listen and understand what the priest preach…so one week later they have another section…so on so forth…but what will they do after listening to such sermon?? Do they refer back to the bible on the teaching for that day?? I doubt so!!! And how can one ensure they remember everything the priest teaches?? Since they only attend Sunday Mass!!! In fact i told my catholic frez to read bible after every mass, refer back to the versue that their priest have taught them, drop down note , mediate those words and try to apply it to their daily life if possible. Else what’s the point for attending mass every week and do not remember a single thing of god’s word!!! The foundation of the bible knowledge is very important to all christian, we need not only the priest or pastor to interpret it, but one need to mediate those versue and pray to god for the direction. Don’t simply ensure that all the teaching from the pastor/priest are correct…don’t forget they are human too!!!
Is only when i came across lately two catholic couple are facing terrible divorce due to both husband/wife committed what they call mortal sin adultery, then i was like HUH!!! though catholic pple are very holy …So when questioned my frez…he keep quite…so i tell him, don’t go around telling pple catholic are holy when such thing does happen…at time it does make pple sick!!!
I’m fond of poetry too, but it seems a little odd to Christians from other traditions that a pastor’s interest in it should be more apparent than his interest in Scripture and its context. Your eyebrow would probably raise if I said “My accountants have varied a lot: some of them emphasized the tax system, and some didn’t so much.” Or, “my first optometrist was more interested in folk music than the human eyeball.” Some things, in some callings, just shouldn’t be “a great variable.”
